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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

To preface my first post on here, I'd like to say that I've been self-teaching myself for a solid 4 months now. I took a few months of classical lessons 7 years ago, but I still like to consider myself starting from scratch all over again.

Thus far it's all been fun and games; I've been learning songs that I've had my heart set on for the longest time, but now I'd like to delve a bit deeper into tonal structure and the like.

I've taken an interest in arpeggios, now that I have all of my major and minor chords down so far. I find it fascinating how such beautiful yet simple melodies can be improved from them.

I was browsing the internet and this particular video on YouTube impressed me.

Could anyone be so kind as to point me in the right direction as to what chords he was using in the video?

Also, does anyone have any tips or tricks for improvising with arpeggios? I know there must be more to it than simply trial and error; I know there's a structural pattern to it, I'm just having a hard time figuring out that structure.

He's referring to the common chords in a key. 1 is the key and 2-7 are the rest of the notes of that scale. In the video, it's actually a 4-5-6 progression. 6 is a minor chord. He starts out in D, so it's G-A-Bm. But he switches to Ab, so then it's Db-Eb-Fm. The upper notes come from the scales (D first, then Ab).